Roth attended Peterhouse College, Cambridge, England (B.A., 1945), and the University of London (M.Sc., 1948; Ph.D., 1950). From 1948 to 1966 he held an appointment at University College, London, and then he became professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London, a position he held until 1988.

Roth was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh in 1958. His major work has been in number theory, particularly the analytic theory of numbers, and the work that led to his receiving the Fields Medal had to do with rational approximations to algebraic numbers. If α is any irrational number, algebraic or not, there are infinitely many rational numbers p/q such that | p/q − α | < 1/q2 since the convergents of the continued fraction for α will suffice. The extension of this is the question of describing irrational numbers in terms of the exponent μ for which there are infinitely many approximations p/q satisfying | p/q − α | < 1/qμ. If μ̄ is the upper bound for such exponents the question of the value of μ̄ when a is algebraic was attacked in 1844 by Joseph Liouville, who showed that μ̄ < n if α is an algebraic number of degree n. In 1908 Axel Thue showed that μ̄ < n/2 + 1, and in 1921 Carl Ludwig Siegel showed that μ̄ < 2Square root of√n essentially. In 1947 Freeman J. Dyson improved that to μ̄ < Square root of√2n. In 1955 Roth showed that μ̄ = 2 for any algebraic number α. It was a solution of considerable difficulty. Roth is also known for his work on integer sequences and, in particular, his use of Selberg sieves and investigations in analytic number theory.